ABSTRACT
In the United States, work-related musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) are prevalent and expensive to treat.
In 2001, there were 216,400 “repeated trauma” cases reported by private industry, which translates to a
rate of 23.8 cases per 10,000 worker hours of exposure (United States Department of Labor, 2003). Data
from the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation (Hamrick, 2000) showed that MSDs account for
15.5% of all claims in the workplace, and 48.5% of all workers’ compensation dollars paid go toward
MSDs. Those data also indicated that approximately 40% of these claim costs resulted from back pain
claims and 9% resulted from upper extremity claims.
